Copycat Silk Road drug site reopens after FBI raid

A copycat version of the Silk Road, the web marketplace for illegal drugs shut down by U.S authorities last month, has appeared online.

The site came online Wednesday and has already posted hundreds of narcotics for sale including marijuana and ecstasy and is accepting the digital currency bitcoin as payment, according to reports from All Things Vice, a blog dedicated to the "dark web" – illegal web activities.

"The popularity of Silk Road -- which to a great extent made bitcoin as popular as it has now become -- was meeting a need. Just because Silk Road closed down it doesn't mean the demand will go down," Professor Tim Watson, director of the Cyber Security Centre at De Montfort University, told CNBC.

But he said that now Silk Road is well-known to law enforcement authorities, it could impact trust in the new website.

The bitcoin price saw a sharp surge today rising above $300, but Watson said that it is difficult to attribute this just to the Silk Road news.

The original Silk Road is not the only anonymous black market site to have been shut down recently. Atlantis, which also sold illegal drugs, announced it was shutting down for "security" reasons, allowing users to take their bitcoins one week before it went offline.

Another similar site called Project Black Flag was closed by the administrator who said he or she had "panicked" and stolen the site's bitcoins.

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